Do you love books and reading? If so, you are warmly invited to join us at the 2019-20 Book Club. All church members and friends are welcome! Our first meeting will be Monday, Sept. 23, 7-8:15pm in the church library. We meet the fourth Monday monthly (December and May dates shift due to holidays). You don't have to commit to the whole year; feel free to join us for any of the discussions. But once you come, you may find that all this year’s selections sound good. We have a great mix of classic fiction, modern novels and non-fiction. Hope to see you!

Contact Rick Flynn at
with questions.

Sept. 24The Cherry Harvest : Lucy Sanna. 2015. 500p. A memorable coming-of-age story and love story, laced with suspense, which explores a hidden side of the home front during World War II, when German POWs were put to work in a Wisconsin farm community . . . with dark and unexpected consequences.

Oct. 28Where the Crawdads Sing : Delia Owens. 2018. 379p. For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life — until the unthinkable happens.

Nov. 25Before We Were Yours: Lisa Wingate. 2017. 352p. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

Dec. 16News of the World : Paulette Jiles. 2016. 224p. It is 1870 and Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the 10-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows. Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous.

Jan. 27, 2020

The Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution: Helen Zia. 2019. 544p. Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century.

Feb. 24 The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers: Bridgett M. Davis. 2019. 320p. In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee borrowed $100 from her brother to run a Numbers racket out of her tattered apartment on Delaware Street, in one of Detroit's worst sections. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis' mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, granddaughter of slaves, Fannie became more than a numbers runner: she was a kind of Ulysses, guiding both her husbands, five children and a grandson through the decimation of a once-proud city using her wit, style, guts, and even gun.

March 23 Virgil Wander: Leif Enger. 2018. 352p. Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals―from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking, kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man, to Tom, a journalist and Virgil’s oldest friend...

April 27 The Pioneers : The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal to the West : David McCullough. 2019. 352p.As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River. McCullough tells the story through five major characters...

May 18 Kim: Rudyard Kipling. 1901. 490p. First published in “McClure’s Magazine” between December of 1901 and October of 1901, “Kim” is the story of Kim (Kimball) O’Hara, the orphaned son of a British soldier. Set against the backdrop of “The Great Game” a political conflict between Russia and Great Britain in central Asia, the novel traces the life of the title character from begging and errand running on the streets of Lahore to his schooling at a top English school in Lucknow, where he is trained in espionage, and ultimately to a government appointment where he himself gets to play in “The Great Game.”